Year: 2010

From time to time in my support job I come across customers having problems, sometimes strange ones, that turns out in the end to be due to anti-malware software of some kind or another. By its nature anti-malware software has to be quite invasive if it is going to do things like checking resident files…

I came across this great “portal article” (by which I mean it has links to resources on a particular topic) about Developer Tools & Platforms Performance It starts of with a short plug for Microsoft advisory services but then moves onto a long list of self-help resources, including articles, blog posts and tools. HTH Doug

One answer: Fiddler is pretty good for sniffing web traffic from any process (not just the browser). Also WCF now has some good tracing abilities. Traces can then be viewed using the Service Trace Viewer tool. There may be other answers, but I HTH. Doug

The Microsoft UK Premier support blog has updated its list of blogs by UK individuals and teams working for Microsoft UK Premier support. You can find the list here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspremuk/archive/2010/09/24/premier-support-uk-existing-blogs.aspx HTH Doug

A couple of years ago I was having trouble viewing an XPS document on Window Server 2008. Today I hit the same issue again but this time on Windows Server 2008 R2. Previously in 2008 the XPS Viewer was listed as a sub feature of .NET Framework 3.0. In 2008 R2, it appears instead as…

If you are having trouble installing updates, either a service pack or other update, on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 then the System Update Readiness Tool might help you out. You might even want to consider it as a preventative check to run from time to time. You…

Ok, time for a bit of Friday humour. I recently became a Dad for a second time so my mind is working in weird ways at the moment as a result of sleep deprivation…. Downtime – when they are asleep. Unlike in computing, this time is welcome and to be made the most of Out…

We’ve now published the KB article for a new hotfix that arose from a customer case I was working on recently: FIX: Inline data-binding expressions in a templated web user control disappear after you generate a local resource for an ASP.NET 2.0 web application If after reading the article you want the fix, there is…

I was helping a colleague recently on an issue to do with long file system paths and the challenges and limitations of handling them in .NET. I knew there were issues but could not recall all the details. Anyway, I just came across a wrapper class on Codeplex to assist in handling long paths. The…

Microsoft Premier Support UK blog have launched a new blog here. If you are a Microsoft customer based in the UK with a Premier support contract or have interest in getting one then this could be a useful blog for you. HTH Doug